Category Archives: Irritation Meditation

This is where I give memes, tweets, and various one liners more thought than they probably deserve.

The Killer is in the Details.

02 Friday Dec 2022

Posted by in Irritation Meditation, Movies

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Okay, this is just silly but…

I noticed that “Navajo Blues” can now be found on Youtube. This is a clunky old crime story with a Navajo cop and a Vegas cop providing the obligatory odd-ball team of police officers. It’s one of the sillier movies that Irene Bedard has made in her career, and I’m sure that I could find all manner of absurdities in this flick if I went back and watched it again. (A casino and some roadside sandpaintings come to mind.) Still, one particular thing stands out in my mind. I first saw this film when I was living in Fort Defiance, Arizona, a short drive from Window Rock, and a long drive from Las Vegas. I made the first drive every day to and from work, and the latter about once every month or two so as to visit friends and family in the Vegas area.

Point being that I was pretty familiar with the drive out I-40 from Vegas to Window Rock. Which is why I was pretty surprised to learn that one of the main protagonists of this film, a cop from Vegas, was going to fly out to Yuma so that Irene Bedard could go pick him up at the airport.

Yuma?

I kept thinking, is that even closer to Window Rock than Vegas?

Turns out it is.

By about 2 miles.

…which might just prove that Irene Bedard is about nicest person that ever lived. Who else would drive that far to meet someone too stupid to find a closer airport?

(You can find the reference at about the 19-minute mark.)

Agreements Be Damned!

20 Saturday Mar 2021

Posted by in Irritation Meditation, The Bullet Point Mind

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It has become fashionable to begin open discussion sessions and training seminars by going over a list of agreements with those present. The idea here is to elicit agreement from the audience for certain ground rules of discussion. Things like; “Be constructive,” “Be present,” or “Listen for understanding,” are commonly entered to a list of agreements. Each of these rules are supposed to encourage good speaking and listening behavior, and to help people get a sense for what is expected of them in the meeting to follow. The point of calling these principles ‘agreements,’ and for beginning to meeting by discussing them is, of course, to get some buy-in for the rules of engagement from those present in the session.

As these principles are almost always worded in nice positive terms, I imagine they also serve as a kind of comfort; a way of encouraging people to participate in what follows by encouraging them to act in good faith and to believe that others present will do the same.

It all sounds quite wonderful.

Frankly, these things always make me want to vomit.

Why?

First, this is fake buy-in culture at its worst. Like focus groups, an agreement list is often a means of disguising an executive decision as a group agreement. In this case the executive is often a facilitator, but the principle is the same; the group present is being asked to place its stamp of approval on a decision that has already been made. When a facilitator in a large meeting hauls out a list of ‘agreements,’ and invites people to say whether or not they support each individual agreement, they do so in a context ripe with group-think dynamics. Someone might get by with objecting to one or another item on a list of agreements, but they are just as likely to brand themselves the resident trouble-maker, and this is going to happen at the start of the whole meeting. Not to mention, everyone wants to get on with things. Voice enough objections and it’s likely to become a problem. Under such circumstances, there is a strong expectation the agreements brought into a meeting by facilitator are going to be, well, …agreed to. Hence, the notion that these are terms arrived at by a group process is often a thinly-disguised pretense for a set of rules fostered by the facilitator.

There may be room negotiation, but some of the participants have a lot more room to maneuver than others.

What does the facilitator get out of this?

They get the ability to say that all those present agreed to the terms in the list, but that assumes the agreements were ever really open to negotiation in the first place, which often as not just isn’t true. Serious input is particularly unlikely in unfamiliar settings and with unfamiliar people, and it is even less likely in the workplace wherein people may have been directed to participate in meetings, often with their bosses present. Either way, the prospect of saying ‘no’ to a given agreement is loaded with unnecessary stress, and most importantly, that stress is unconnected to any standing interest. Somebody who is prepared to voice an opinion about an actual policy will think twice before picking a fight about an issue that will be over at the end of a meeting. So, the tendency is to pass on the invitation to weigh in on the agreements and see how things go.

Yes, people can say ‘no’ to an agreement, and no, they cannot do so without at least some concerns about how their disagreement will affect their role in the meeting or even in the workplace at large.

A facilitator need not come with prepared agreements to get what she wants out of a group. She can disguise her agreements fairly easily. In true focus group fashion, a good facilitator just asks people what they think the agreements should be. She doesn’t need to show them a list of agreements or even tell them what she thinks should be on it. She can just ask them what they think. She will almost certainly get a number of suggestions about being respectful and constructive, etc. If others present in the meeting are familiar with these lists, they may even chime in with a few more of the current standards. Ask a couple leading questions, and someone in the group may just supply any missing items a facilitator really wants. If all else fails, a facilitator won’t be blamed for suggesting one or two herself, especially not if she waits till the end. It will look like she put others views before her own. They won’t realize that this item or two completes a list that the facilitator was ticking off from the very beginning. Do this right, and folks may actually think the resulting list of agreements are actually the result of a group process,

…well, except for that one item.

…and that other one too!

The positive nature of the principle can also be quite deceptive. I once attended a meeting in which people were told to take off their hats. Sitting there with my literal hat in my literal hand, I wondered what this meant. We were told that it meant people should forget their role in the work organization; that they should speak freely and without fear of consequences. I remember thinking that if this were true, none of us would have been there.

…most anyway.

And yes, I am quite serious about that. This particular meeting was scheduled an a terribly inappropriate time and many of us were stressing over the work we were not getting done while in this meeting, work that needed doing immediately.

More to the point, this was an incredibly naive thing to say, recklessly so, given that the point was made by an outside consultant who would soon return home while the rest of us went back to worth with each other, and with our bosses

…remembering who said what about whatever.

The potential for serious negative consequences was very real in this instance, and it was completely irresponsible for this facilitator to suggest otherwise. It’s one thing to encourage good behavior, and it is quite another to provide false assurance that such behavior can be expected of others.

In the end, the problem with agreements is all to simple; they represent a kind of two-faced use of authority. On the one hand, a speaker is using agreements to lock down the rules of engagement for a discussion. On the other hand, they are trying to distribute authority for those rules among all those present. It’s one of the many ways in which people uncomfortable with their own authority try to hide it from themselves and others, even as they use that very authority to control others. Some are more heavy-handed than others, and not every agenda is anything to be afraid of, but there is little positive to be gained from disguising an actual agenda or the authority used to advance it.

Frankly, I would rather a facilitator just told us what they expect from a group rather than pretend we are all making the decision together. The rest of us can like it or we can lump it, but I figure a facilitator ought to do us the courtesy of acknowledging their own authority when exercising that very authority over us.

Personal (Ir-)Responsibility: An Irritation Meditation

28 Saturday Dec 2019

Posted by in Irritation Meditation

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indexhjkukThis meme to my left just smacks of good old fashioned common sense, doesn’t it? I mean, who could be against “personal responsibility?” Just reading it makes me want to go take care of something, maybe take responsibility for something wrong even as I fix that very wrong up good, just like a real man oughtta.

Then go fly a flag!

Yeah buddy!

Seriously now. The first problem here isn’t that personal responsibility is a bad thing. Of course not. It’s that the world itself isn’t going to magically fill up with people who live up to that value any time soon.

Neither is Murica!

The idiots at Turning Point USA didn’t really come up with this bit of folk wimpdom, I don’t think, not any more than they came up with the various fake founder quotes bearing their name lately, but I’ve ranted about that before. This meme can’t be debunked with a simple press for evidence, but it comforts the already-comfortable just the same. Like fake quotes from America’s founding fathers, this meme is designed to light up a warm and fuzzy feeling right in that place where folks might keep their inner old codger.

I think just about all of us have had that experience, we’ve all seen some living train wreck crashing through our presence without any sense of personal responsibility. It’d be easy enough to imagine they could do better in life, both for their own sake and for those around them, if only they would just take some responsibility for their actions. Collect enough such stories and I suppose it could become really tempting to think that same prescription would go a long way toward making the world a better place.

But of course we could say the same thing of kindness and compassion.

Of honesty.

Of hard work.

Of self restraint.

…you get the idea.

It’s the nature of moral principles. We can often see how neglecting them means unnecessary hardship for ourselves and others. We can also see that people do neglect them on a regular basis. Sadly, that just isn’t going to change any time soon. So any solution predicated on this possibility is a non-solution.

But of course the point of this meme isn’t really to hope against all hope that everyone suddenly learns to cowboy up and resolve every problem from homelessness to the persistent popularity of boy bands. (Dammit anyhow!) No, the point here is to conjure the illusion that this fantasy is an actual solution to real-world  problems, and perhaps more importantly, to point a finger, so to speak, at those who may be in the way of that fantasy-solution.

Why are there poor and homeless people? Cause the lazy bastards won’t work! Why do people cheat on tests or taxes? Cause they haven’t taken personal responsibility for meeting their t-challenges. Why is there crime? Why is there corruption in Congress? And why do the Bluetooth devices in my home fight over the signal from my cell phone? You got it! Cause some bastard hasn’t taken responsibility for making it otherwise. The meme conjures these and so many other inferences without stating them outright. It invites us to imagine a brave new world in which everyone tackles their own problems and we all right off into the sunset after enjoying a hearty steak-dinner at the end of every day.

…and really, let’s be honest, that first item above, the one about poverty, is probably the big one for this particular fantasy.

The folks at Turning Point USA do love their commie-bashing, so the poverty theme is right up their alley. At the heart of this folk idiocy is the notion that such problems are, at bottom, simple, just a result of lazy people who refuse to take responsibility for their own lives. We have poor people, so the thinking goes, because of the poor people. It’s their own damned fault! If only they took responsibility for their own welfare, they’d be just fine, but they won’t so it’s their problem, and not ours. We can forget any questions about the underlying social causes of poverty, and we can flat out ignore the existence of the working poor or the known consequences of getting seriously sick in a nation whose government is so wholly devoted to the profits of the insurance industry. No, if people are poor, it is their problem. That is all we need know.

If only the poors would just buck up, America would be the fifties fantasy-land some of us grew up watching on television. And boy-howdy, wouldn’t that just be swell!?! But they don’t, so we can’t and it’s all their fault.

And that’s what’s important; knowing whose fault it is.

Thus, a solution to a problem becomes a means of avoiding it!

…speaking of responsibility, and the utter and complete lack of it.

 

Oh Come On!

16 Friday Nov 2018

Posted by in History, Irritation Meditation, Native American Themes, Re-Creations

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0752efbeda5d33092f99701b68c1b0b9I see this image from time to time circulating about the net. It passes, I suppose, for a kind of homage to Lozen, one of at least three women who fought beside Geronimo at one time or another in the course of his campaigns. Lozen, it seems was with him at the end. She was sent to Florida along with the rest of his warriors (and some of the scouts who had helped bring him). As mentioned in the meme here, the picture above was taken as she and the other prisoners waited in front of the train to be taken away.

So, what has me griping about this?

Well, take a look at the original. Lozen is the 6th figure from the right on the back row.

…and here is another close-up derived from that same photo:

So, just take a moment to compare the two and you might be able to tell what’s bothering me about the first photo.

Yeah, …they sexed her up.

The computer rendering in the first pic definitely lightened up her skin, brought her eyes out more, and gave the overall impression of much more delicate features. Hell, you can practically hear the photographer asking her to lick her lips and work it for the camera. The woman in this meme is a modern heterosexual (white?) male’s dream girl. From what I gather of the stories told about her, Lozen was no such dream.

Far from it!

The problem here isn’t necessary a question of objectivity. People make choices when they render a photo or tell a story. Maybe I’m being a little too cynical here, but I can’t help thinking the choices made in producing the image for this meme aren’t entirely in keeping with the spirit of the woman it portrays.

In Cheeto We Trust

08 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by in Irritation Meditation, Politics, Uncategorized

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Whenever I’m tempted to simply accept the seemingly innocuous gestures of civil religion here in America, someone or something comes along and reminds me that it simply isn’t safe to do so, that the boundary between church and state is worth defending, and that the potential for compromise on this issue is a well-poisoned well.

Case in point?

This bit of Cheeto-driven drivel, right here!

CheetoBreakfastPrayers

This pathetic tweet is an artifact of the National Prayer Breakfast. It’s an occasion when the President bows to the authority of political Christians, and vouchasafes their victories in the early days of the cold war. Whatever else this event is, it’s a good reminder that the cold war was always about internal politics as much as confrontation with external enemies. It’s also proof that little has changed under the sun (except perhaps the ratio of black carbon in the atmosphere, which is of course a heresy to the breakfasting prayer-mongers Trump spoke with today). Seriously, this event is the legacy of people who wanted Jesus to roll back the institutions of the New Deal, people who wanted to take away the social safety net and leave us all with nothing but Jesus and our own boot straps to help us in times of need. “In God we trust?” The subtext of that message is that government isn’t going to help you all.

That was always the point.

…which is why this message may be particularly relevant coming from an administration Hell-bent on tearing up every government agency that Americans rely on to keep us safe and prosperous. When the Manchurian Cheeto is done, we may well have nothing more than Jesus to keep poisons out of our water supply, remove the Russians from our computers, and hold the crooks at bay in the multinational cartels we now call banks. Jesus is already what the Republicans had offer the people of Flint and Puerto Rico. It’s what they offered to Southern Californians as a good chunk of the state burned down. It’s all we’ll be left with when the political Christians at the National Prayer Breakfast see Donald Trump deliver up the national disaster they’ve been praying for all these decades.

For all their flag-waving and Bible-thumping, those behind the National Prayer Breakfast are neither patriots nor Christians, and they certainly aren’t conservative in any meaningful sense of the word. What they want for this country is a disaster, and Donald Trump is delivering that disaster. He is the answer to their prayers.

The hypocrisy orgy known as the National Prayer Breakfast gives us a lot to gripe about. Donald Trump was fully immersed in the spirit of the occasion. He shared a good number of thoughts about the importance of faith in America, and in the American people. All utter crap of course, but he shared it all just the same.

For purposes of brevity, let’s just stick with the tweet, that portion of the wretched breakfast he chose to put into the only literary form the man and his fan base truly appreciate. He makes three points in this tweet, each of which is supposed to tell us something about the importance of God to the United States of America. Each of these points is damned misleading, which I suppose is a step up from the outright falsehoods we normally fall from this fountain of false facts, fake news, and utter foolishness. Still, a moment on each point will go a long way towards illustrating why Donald Trump is wrong about the role of God in America, and why the political Christians who eat this message up are wrong as well.

The first thing to notice is what is not mentioned in this vapid tweet, and that is the U.S. Constitution. It is the U.S. Constitution, and religion clauses of the First Amendment, that make the role of religion in our government such a hotly debated topic. One of the most fascinating things about those who want us to think of America as a Christian nation is just how hard they work to leave the Constitution out of the discussion. That document doesn’t help them, so they have to work around it. They have just one problem. Simply failing to mention the U.S. Constitution is too obvious. It sets up a great big red flag and invites those of us on the secular end too many obvious entry points to push our own point of view. They can’t just not say anything. That won’t work. So, they typically do what Trump does here. They cite the Declaration instead.

Like Jesus sent to atone for the sins the humanity, The Declaration of Independence serves to atone for the silence of the Constitution on the subject of God. (Yes, the Constitution mentions God in the date. If that impresses, you then I have an acre of arctic ice-pack to sell you.) The Constitution simply doesn’t say what Evangelical Christians want it to say. It does not invoke God as the authority for creation of the U.S. Government. (It locates that authority in the people.) It doesn’t say that you have to be Christian to hold office. (In fact, it expressly forbids such a standard.) And of course it contains a clause holding religion at bay right there alongside the right to practice religion. We can debate the proper interpretation of the establishment clause, but its mere existence is an annoyance to those who would clearly rather live in a theocracy. You can read the Constitution all day, but it won’t give you the license to tie Jesus to our politics that Evangelical Christians want out of the document. So, they typically talk about the Declaration of Independence instead.

Just like the Cheeto-in-Chief did today.

Of course those pushing the America-as-a-Christian-nation theme typically misread the Declaration itself, often confusing this reference to a Creator (written by a man widely regarded as a Deist) with a direct reference to Jesus himself and nearly always confusing this piece of propaganda with a clear plan of government. They ignore the clear parallels to logic of Hobbesian thought and other connections to Enlightenment philosophy in order to cast the language of the Declaration in terms closer to those of scripture. Most importantly, they reverse the point of the argument. Jefferson wasn’t using rights to prove the existence of a creator. He was using a reference to the Creator to explain the existence of rights, and no, there is nothing in the relevant passage of the Declaration that suggests the rights will cease to exist if we take the Creator out of the picture. All of this is lost on those consuming messages like that Trump delivered today at the National Prayer Breakfast. When they reference the Declaration, they see it as an argument for belief in God (which they assume means Jesus), but they are dead wrong in more ways than they could possibly count.

Simply put, the Declaration doesn’t mean what Donald Trump pretends it means. Neither does it mean what the political Christians at the National Prayer Breakfast want it to mean.

I doubt there is much in the Bible that means what they want it to mean either.

Or the Constitution that matter.

The whole shell game is crap!  People ought to stop talking about the Declaration when they mean to address questions about the Constitution, and they ought to stop reading either one as though it was the script for the youth pastor in a particularly uneducated part of the country. Most of us are smarter than that, but that doesn’t stop some people from recycling the same old garbage, which is what Trump did today. The whole con has been painfully obvious for decades. That should be as obvious to Christians as it is to the rest of us.

But not to the political Christians at the National Prayer Breakfast!

As to ‘In God We Trust’? That motto was adopted by the nation in 1956. It was part of the same movement that led to things like the National Prayer Breakfast, which makes it an interesting point for Trump to make. In doing so, he is simultaneously invoking a principle many assume to be a timeless part of American history and also giving a nod to the faithful who know the history of the prayer breakfast, people who understand the aggressiveness of their own political agenda, people who understand how divisive that phrase was always meant to be. It may sound like a nice an unifying message, if that is, you don’t give a damn about those who don’t trust god after all. In effect, the motto says of the rest of us that we aren’t really part of America. We don’t really count.

That is of course precisely the point. Always was.

“One nation, under God?”

Same story. This too was also added in those days shortly after Ike had been reluctantly cajoled into making public professions of faith in the official service of the nation. It too has always served as a clear reminder to the rest of us that we do not really belong. One nation under God? If you don’t believe in God, that little utterance, that bit of prayer stuck into the middle of an oath, gives the lie to the whole charade, it drops you right out of the narrative in the very moment the thoughtless celebrate unity at your expense.

Again, that is the point of the ritual.

So, there we have it, one twisted effort to dodge the Constitution on the subject of church and state, and two tokens of divisiveness wrapped in a cloak of unity. Whether he means it or not, whether Donald Trump is capable of ‘meaning’ anything in the conventional sense of the word, this is the message he offered America’s political Christians today. He endorsed their most aggressive agenda and made a point to isolate their enemies. Small wonder that these folks love him despite his obvious insincerity. Today Donald Trump offered the religious right the power to which they feel entitled, and he did it in precisely the same deceitful tones they have always known and loved. That’s our President; completely without substance, and utterly disingenuous.

The religious right wouldn’t have him any other way!

Alex Jones and the Weaponization of Christmas (An Irritation Meditation)

28 Thursday Dec 2017

Posted by in Irritation Meditation, Politics, Religion

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Surfing the net can be a lot like turning over rocks in the countryside. Every now and then you find something underneath a rock (or a link) so disgusting you just can’t pull your eyes off it. Case in point? This little bit of filth from Info Wars.

To begin with, let me apologize for bringing this shitgasm into the lives of you, my readers. I am sorry.

Alex Jones and his bunch are a special kind of putrid, but sadly, they are a special kind of putrid with a lot more influence than they deserve. So, I reckon it’s worth keeping track of their antics.

…regretful though that task may be.

There is a lot of crap in this video, but what got my attention here is the opening pitch.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated anyone hash-tagging ‘Merry Christmas’, ‘Christmas Eve’, ‘Christmas’, or ‘Jesus’ a far right wing extremist.”

Sounds pretty shocking doesn’t it? What could possibly lead the folks at Info Wars to such an impluasible conclusion? As they go on to explain in the video, the Southern Poverty Law (SPLC) has been tracking these hashtags in their hate tracker. What is the hate tracker? Well let’s take that information directly from the SPLC.

Screenshot 2017-12-28 13.22.50

So, there it is. The hate tracker tracks trends in right wing activity on twitter. It is not a statement about the meaning of any of these terms, nor is it a theoretical account of the trends it identifies. It isn’t even the result of a conscious effort to call attention to specific terms, or the specific use of them in right wing circles. If a hashtag trends in the activities of right wing extremists, it will come up on the tracker.

Simply put, the hate tracker picked up a lot of Christmas tweetage among the right wingers. What that means is an entirely different question. One thing it doesn’t mean is that anyone who uses these terms is a right wing extremist. No, the SPLC was not saying that, and the hackwits at Info Wars know this.

Both the Info Wars video and the Breitbart article on this subject do present a (more or less) accurate account of this in the meat of their stories. The trick here is the mismatch between that substance and the labeling. The folks at Info Wars know very well how the hate tracker works, and they account for it, but then they draw a conclusion totally unsupported by the facts they themselves provide. They are hoping you won’t remember the details, but that you will remember the pitch line they used to start the story. They are hoping you will come away from this thinking that a prominent liberal source has tried to label all talk of Jesus and Christmas as right wing extremism. This is simply not true.

It’s a bit after the bell, but this video is one more shot in the fake war on Christmas. More to the point, it is part of an ongoing effort to weaponize Christmas, to recast the celebration of Christmas as an explicitly political act, a defiance of liberal politics. IN effect, it is an attempt to make the celebration of Christmas into a partisan gesture, one which will divide Americans still further, and pointlessly so.

It may well be that the hashtag trends noted by the SPLC are also part of that effort to weaponize Christmas. Certainly, there have been a lot of people using ‘Merry Christmas’ to say something more like ‘fuck you liberals’, and at least a few of them have been doing this on the net. I expect right wing extremists also wish people Merry Christmas for conventional reasons, like actually wanting them to have a merry Christmas, but I reckon at least a few of those hits the SPLC caught in their tracker were conscious efforts to carry on the war on the eve of Christmas itself. Either way, the Info Wars piece is a conscious effort to spin that narrative up a notch, to pretend that liberals have declared Christmas itself a hateful expression.

The problem is of course that they are lying.

The real question is why? Why tell this particular lie? What does it get the people at Info Wars? I get that the SPLC has its own set of biases, but no, they are NOT trying to crush Christianity. Neither are they trying to steal the Christmas presents out from under your tree. This conscious demonization of the SPLC simply isn’t about correcting bias it’s about enshrining it. It’s about making sure that people do not make careful distinctions between actual hate groups and mere conservatives, or for that matter ordinary Americans of any political stripe. Info Wars wants the public to think the SPLC cannot tell the difference ordinary well-wishing and a racist political agenda. The problem of course is that the SPLC can and does make such distinctions all the time. Alex Jones and his merry band of festering bloodfarts, on the other hand, would love to be thought of as conservative, even patriotic. They would love to have their own brand of lunacy pass for good old fashioned conservative politics, and they would love to have the right wing fanatics who make up their customer base thought of as ordinary people. If they can muddle the distinction themselves, then they can pass all manner of lunatic ideas under the banner of basic American values. That’s their pay-off.

There is always a pay-off for this kind of political charade. For Trump, the War on Christmas was just another effort to brand something (Christmas) to which he contributes absolutely nothing. For the likes of Bill O’Reilly, it was grist for a combative mill that helped keep his ratings high. For Info Wars and Breitbart, it’s the hope for legitimacy. It is an effort by those on the lunatic fringe to pass themselves off as legitimate, to pretend that the ideologically committed racists who regularly consume their products are just ordinary Americans who love Christmas. In effect, they are telling the public that the SPLC and liberals in general cannot tell the difference between a conservative and a deplorable. But we can.

Yes, there is a difference.

The Dumbitude is in the Details

07 Thursday Dec 2017

Posted by in Irritation Meditation, Politics

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It’s always fascinating to see the slippage commonly coming between a story and its headline, and again between a headline and a social media message about it. The hackwits at Fox News are always happy to provide examples of this sort of thing. Last week I couldn’t help but gripe about their misrepresentation of a major story on twitter. Today, the angle isn’t all that clear, but sloppy slippage is a habit that seems to serve them well.

What got my attention a few minutes ago was this tweet:

FoxbonnieClyde

So, I see this and I am thinking; Really? I always thought Bonnie and Clyde were in their car when they were shot. Or was that just the movie? No, I’m pretty sure they were in their car. So, when was this? Just before they got in? How long before… No, this says the pic was taken right before they were shot. But…

…and thus I clicked the link (which is admittedly to say that I fricking fell for this click-bait bullshit. Still kicking myself over that.)

So, anyway, and at the expense of providing a link to a common source of right wing propaganda, here is the story.

The opening passages of this story are fascinating in much the same sense that grading a freshman essay is often fascinating. By ‘fascinating’ I of course mean saddening. It’s not just the brief, blurby, writing style that jumps out at me. (Seriously, this is clearly written for people with the attention span of not-even-gerbils.) What really irks with a vengeance here is the complete inability to stick to a consistent account of the story.

Check it out!

BonClydestory

Mini-paragraph 2 says the photo was taken ‘days before’ Bonnie and Clyde were shot down. Mini paragraph 3 says ‘shortly before’. I guess ‘days before’ could count as ‘shortly before’, at least if you aren’t paying attention enough to wonder why they are re-framing the time-scale in the very next sentence. Most sensible people would think that was at least a little odd. And most sensible people would think that change of wording does shift the meaning, at least a little bit. Either way, it would certainly be a stretch to say that ‘days before’ counts as ‘right before’ or ‘moments before’, as indicated on the Fox News twitter account.

So why do this? It really doesn’t seem like deliberate spin. It seems more like a short attention span. Perhaps, it’s a habit of a mind accustomed to spinning an inch into a mile every chance it gets. These micro-shifts in meaning can be damned useful if you are spinning a story with a purpose. A mountain is easily reduced to a molehill with a little crafty word choice. The folks at Fox News are well accomplished at this technique. Still, it’s a little odd to see this much slippage crowded into such a small and simple account. The only clear pay-off in this particular instance is the added dramatic value of the click-bait, but even that doesn’t explain the shear quantity of equivocation in the Fox account. The story itself uses two different time-frames, and that shift isn’t explained by the desire to generate click-bait. Neither does the use of two different time-frames on the twitter account. A subtle shift is one thing, but these guys are all over the place. I find myself wondering if they folks can stick to a simple account even when they don’t have an axe to grind on the story.

Seriously, I can’t figure out how this will help to advance the war on the poor. Neither will it enable the Manchurian Man-Child to gin up a war to help keep all our minds off the Mueller investigation. I can’t even tell how this proves Hillary killed Han Solo in the living room with a candle stick. It’s not all that agenda driven. It’s just drivel-driven. it’s also a hell of a way to hack up a simple story.

…idiots!

I Rant! I Does!

23 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by in Education, Irritation Meditation, Write Drunk, Edit Stoned

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Me gal thinks I'm grumpy. I really don't know why.

My gal thinks I’m grumpy. I really don’t know why.

Context? We don’t need no freaking context! Let’s just get this started…

1) Reform happens. What needs reforming; who will take charge of the reform and what direction the reforms will take remains to be determined. In any case these are not important questions. Reform will happen! It is a singularity.

2) Resistance is futile. The most effective opposition to any given reform consists of failure to act on it. Many great plans have withered and died as people went about their business, just as they did before, but nothing nourishes a reform quite like vocal and open opposition. Write a few memos against a reform agenda, and you just may get added to whatever committee has been formed to enact it. Write a few more and you just may find yourself chair of that committee. (…true story!) You may ignore a reform, unless of course you can’t, but active resistance will shine a rainbow of regret all over your already miserable work-day.

3) Change is a Many-Splintered Thing. Support for any given reform means that people have found a way to read their own agendas into that reform. Every ‘yea’, ‘amen’, or ‘right on’ is invariably a sign that someone sees in a given proposal the chance to do something they’ve really been meaning to do for a long time. Listen carefully to the planning of a new policy and you will hear as many different reforms as there are active and energetic participants. When a reform policy is finally put in place, it may look nothing like it did in its initial conception. In fact, its originator is doing very well if the final policy isn’t completely inimical to her own goals.

4) Fresh and Refresh. Listen carefully to a given proposal and you just may hear the echoes of an old policy. Listen very carefully, and you may just realize how much reform is really about repackaging, but don’t try telling that to those peddling old drugs in new prescription bottles. Just learn to present your standard way of doing things as a new and original approach to business. Say it with enthusiasm and hope that you then get to play tug-of-war with a host of enthusiastic supporters, each of whom really wants to turn your new/old thing into their new/old thing and then make sure everyone else does it.

5) ‘Studies say’ and ‘research suggests’. You would be surprised at just how often a room full of highly educated people needs no more than to hear one of these phrases to be convinced that whatever claim follows them must be true.

6) Correlation is not causation. …unless of course you are one of the millions of people making policy on the basis of nothing more than a correlation loosely established using shady procedures most of which never make it into the summary that you only skimmed anyway.

…just like everyone else at the committee table!

7) You can count on objectivity, or at least visa versa. The most important thing about objectivity is that it takes the norm of numbers. It isn’t that the numbers provide more accurate information than qualitative data, personal reflection, or even interpretive dance, but committees know what to do with numbers. They can act on numbers, and that makes all the difference in the world. Once a committee gets wind of a compelling set of digits, they aren’t going to be too fussy about where those numbers came from. …or too patient with anyone who does want to get fussy about that.

8) Yes, in fact you are a number. For all the talk of ‘learning objectives’, ‘learning outcomes’, and other nice fluffy ‘learning’ talk about intellectual development, never forget that a student is also a statistic, and a very significant one at that. Her presence on forms describing participation in your institution and/or your own classroom can be used to facilitate transfer of funding back and forth between various agencies, both private and public. She may or may not learn a damned thing from any part of the curriculum, but her significance as a statistic is vital to all concerned.

Even you!

And yes, her too!

At least some of the money triggered by the presence of students on forms typically makes its way to faculty. Whether it be now or later, the presence of any given student on forms may also provide her with sufficient forms to open up new possibilities of money transfers into her own future bank accounts. No sane person would say that it was more important than all that ‘learning’ mumbo jumbo, but few sane people would allow the learning mumbo jumbo to interfere with the digital life of a catalyst for funding transfers.

This might seem a particularly cynical view of education, but don’t despair. With any luck your student will learn whatever she really needs to know from social media. …probably when she’s supposed to be listening to you.

9) Autonomy is a double-clawed hammer. Staff and administration will either want to change something in your classroom or they will want you and your students to spend more time outside of it. Every new policy will exacerbate one or both of these tendencies.

Time and again, you will encounter policies which make claims on your contact time. In the worse case scenario, you may face command and control over what you teach and how you teach it. In the best case scenario, you will be dealing with opportunity costs that can leave you kissing your own plans for this or that lesson goodbye. It will only take 15 minutes to complete this survey, explain that policy, or just step back and let someone from student services talk to your students for a bit.

…and cross something you meant to teach off your to-do list.

Don’t worry though, because you can always save the essential lessons by eliminating the most interesting themes from your lesson plans (you know the ones that made you want to become a teacher in the first place). There is always time for reform!

If the faculty at your institution have successfully minimized these incursions into your contact hours, then congratulations, but now you have a new problem. Your classroom has become dark matter to staff and administration, which means everything that takes place inside it is irrelevant to their view of the educational process. It has to be irrelevant to them, because they can’t affect it. So, when everyone else sits down to plan out how they want to improve the learning process at your school, they will envision these improvements taking place anywhere else but your classroom. This means the institutional world outside your classroom is going to get a lot busier. You will be attending more meetings and writing more reports, but don’t be too depressed about the time lost to course preparations, because your students will also be too busy taking advantage of support activities to attend to their studies.

And cosmic balance is thus preserved!

10) New people bring new policies. This often has the fringe benefit of meaning that old policies die with each new administrator, but rest assured these new administrators will replace them with something new. The near certainty that new policies will be allowed to die on the vine with the next administration does not seem to dampen enthusiasm for creating new ones. It’s the cycle of life.

11) Don’t Kid yourself. You are not quitting this job to go and join the circus.

***

Kumbaya! The committee chair sleeps tonight!

It’s the Disinformation Charlie Brown

05 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Irritation Meditation, Politics

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BQiZ-CdCUAAcJsVI came across this D-Nuts bit last night. It’s not the first time I’ve seen it, but what the Hell? This time I thought I’d take a moment to bloggetize a comment or two on the matter. What’s interesting about this piece, you may ask?

We could start with the most obvious game that’s being played here. On one level it is simply a red herring. A claim about the present-day Republican Party has been answered with a series of claims about the history of the GOP and the Democrats, thus substituting a question about what each HAS BEEN for an argument about what each IS today.

Taken at face value, this red herring contains another problem, a seriously convenient omission of historical information, namely the shift in voting patterns over the 20th century culminating in the famous “southern strategy” of Richard Nixon. Simply put, an awful lot of southern conservatives switched parties over the years since the founding of the GOP and of the KKK. It’s tempting to say that a number of them did so precisely because they saw the modern GOP as a better vehicle for their own racist agenda. In any event, the shift has left both parties flip-flopped on civil rights and the proper balance of federal and state authority. There are some other factors besides race at work here to be sure, but a number of GOP leaders have made conscious appeals to racist sentiments over the years and the results have been quite striking.

So, is it fair to say that the GOP is racist?

I could see reasonable arguments against an affirmative answer. Those arguments do not rest on a conveniently incomplete account of history.

Even still, I can’t help thinking the best (worst) part about this cartoon is just how well its content fits with its intended purpose. Here we have Charlie Brown whitesplaining the topic of racism to Franklin, the one black character in Peanuts. Franklin is clueless in comparison to Charlie’s wisdom. The cartoonist has him reacting with a stubborn inarticulate refusal to see Charlie’s point or even to engage the argument in any meaningful way. He just sticks to his position as if incapable of grasping the issues at hand. He is in effect simply playing the so called race card without any substantive reasons for doing so. The GOP isn’t racist, so the cartoon would have us believe, but apparently it takes a white person to understand that.

…a message which would probably come as no surprise to Franklin.